on books

Right-wing deniers of the robust findings of modern atmospheric science sometimes claim that the whole idea of global warming is just a front. What “warmers”, as they call them, really want is allegedly not just a sharp reduction in fossil-fuel emissions but a wholesale socioeconomic transition to tree-hugging socialism. Such cynics will be gladdened by Naomi Klein’s new book. For in it she does explicitly argue that the present “climate emergency” provides an excellent excuse for global revolution.

“Strange things happen in this world,” Haruki Murakami says. “You don’t know why, but they happen.” It could be a guiding motto for all of his fiction, but he is talking specifically about a minor character in his new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The character is a jazz pianist who seems to have made a pact with death, and is able to see people’s auras.

“Why that pianist can see the colours of people, I don’t know,” Murakami muses. “It just happens.” Novels in general, he thinks, benefit from a certain mystery. “If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a certain kind of secret stays secret, it’s a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it.”

The world’s most popular cult novelist is sipping coffee in the sunny library of an Edinburgh hotel, which – perhaps disappointingly for admirers of his more fantastical yarns – is not reached through a labyrinthine network of subterranean tunnels. Murakami is relaxed and affable, rather than forbiddingly gnomic. “I’m not mysterious!” he says, laughing.

Someone has taken a shot. At the president of France. In Paris. With a sniper rifle. Like in The Day of the Jackal. But it wasn’t Edward Fox. And it wasn’t Jack Reacher. Someone else. Who was it? And why? Those are some questions. And Reacher is going to find the answers. By fighting some men. And shooting them. With his bare hands. And some bullets. Jack Reacher.

The novelist David Mitchell doesn’t believe in the death of the book. “Books take hundreds of years to disappear, once they’re printed. That’s just a fact, isn’t it?” he says, mock quizzically. “But the internet, that depends on a network of power grids. That’s not a matter of opinion. And those grids depend on energy sources. That isn’t just some liberal sandal-wearing Guardian attitude.” He smiles. And as the oil and gas run out, he asks, “Where is the energy coming from?”

That is one of the questions powering Mitchell’s new book, The Bone Clocks, which is possibly his best novel yet. True to form, it features a set of interlocking stories in multiple genres. There is a teenage girl running away from home in the 1980s, a sociopathic Oxford undergraduate cavorting in the early 90s, the story of a war reporter, a literary satire about a novelist and his critic enemy, and an epilogue of dystopian near-future science fiction, with civilisation retreating in a global “Endarkenment”. Irrupting into these stories, meanwhile, is a supernatural war. The good guys are a group of people who get reincarnated 49 days after they die, with full knowledge of their past lives. The bad guys achieve a kind of pseudo-immortality – they stop ageing, but can still be killed by violence or accident – by murdering psychic children, “decanting” their souls into an evil wine. “A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant,” a literary agent in the novel says, not having read this one.

Ha! The Science of When We Laugh and Why, by Scott Weems (Basic Books)Humour: A Very Short Introduction, by Noël Carroll (Oxford)

Trying to explain a joke has long been considered a paradigm of pedantic futility. That hasn’t stopped thinkers through the ages erecting vast and subtle theories of comedy. But none of them had brain-scanners. Perhaps cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems can explain once and for all why Louis CK is funny and David Cameron isn’t.

Very early on, the book’s ultramodern tone is set. We are invited to agree that no one could ever have properly known anything about a complex sociocultural phenomenon before lab volunteers started being rolled gently into fMRI tubes. “Humour has some very clear ingredients,” Weems says, “ones that science is just now beginning to reveal.” That sounds exciting. Let’s see what they are. When people in scanners found certain cartoons funny, Weems explains, various parts of their brains increased in activation, and those parts are associated with the “dopamine reward circuit”. What does this reveal to us about the nature of humour? Sweet FA, unless it had never occurred to you that it is pleasurable to be amused. The “dopamine reward circuit”, according to other studies, also gets a jolly workout from cocaine, chocolate and video games. So: nothing new about humour here.

In 1843, Britain’s minister for education announced that every schoolchild in the country would henceforth be given obligatory lessons in the design and maintenance of locomotive engines. “Railways are the future,” he said. “Trains are critical to our economic growth. If our children grow up ignorant of how to build and operate trains, they will be left behind in the global race.”

Some commentators observed mildly that division of labour and expertise was a more efficient way to run a modern society. Everyone could get around on trains, but that didn’t mean everyone needed to know how they worked. Yet the government was adamant. Children had to learn mechanical thinking, it insisted. The new world would be built on the philosophy of pistons.

Soon, unfortunately, the minister for education had to resign, after it was revealed that he had received enormous bribes from locomotive-engine manufacturers. Those companies, naturally, had been eager to get thousands of new workers trained for their own purposes at public expense. In the wake of this scandal, mandatory train-based classes rolled to a sad halt.

I just made all this up, of course, and the analogy with our modern mantra that all children must be taught how to program computers should not be interpreted too closely. In particular, I certainly do not mean to suggest that the current government is in any kind of corrupt relationship with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple or any of the other giant corporations who will profit handsomely from future generations of workers having been educated to their own specifications out of the public purse. Clearly no such corrupt relationship exists.

But then what are we to make of the fashionable view that writing “code” is a crucial skill not just for those who will work as software engineers but for everyone?

Malcolm Gladwell is sometimes criticised on the basis that, although he has a reputation as a thinker, all he does is précis other people’s research. That’s not fair. Popularising academic ideas with style for a broad audience is hardly an ignoble pursuit. The real problem with Gladwell goes far deeper. It is the method that he has helped make ubiquitous in modern non-fiction trade publishing.

“Through these stories,” he explains in the introduction to his latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, “I want to explore two ideas.” The method of “exploring” ideas through stories is now the preferred mode of, or replacement for, serious thought and argument. Unfortunately, it can lead an incautious writer into a conceptual shambles.

Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along. Little things really can make a big difference; trusting your gut can be better than overthinking; successful people work hard.

The art here lies in making the platitudinous conclusion seem like a revelatory place to end up, after one has enjoyed the colourful “stories” about carefully described plucky individuals with certain hairstyles and particular kinds of trousers. (Actual quote: “He is a tall young man with carefully combed dark-brown hair and neatly pressed khakis.”) Such books must thus be constructed with a certain suspenseful cunning. Gladwell likes first to tell an apparently convincing story and then declare that it’s not true, like a magician pulling an empty hat out of a rabbit.

The idealisation of the natural world is as old as the city, to the corrupting influence of which a return to pastoral life is always presented as a cure. But the increasing modern appetite of metropolitan readers for books about walking around and discovering yourself in nature is the literary equivalent of the rise of the north London “farmers’ market”. Both feed on nostalgie de la boue – the French term for a kind of rustic-fancying inverted snobbery, which literally means “nostalgia for the mud”. In the case of the urban consumer of nature writing, of course, the mud is to be hosed off one’s mental Range Rover immediately one lifts one’s eyes from the page and gives silent thanks for the civilised appurtenances of hot yoga and flat whites.

Much of the pastoral literary genre has long been a solidly bourgeois form of escapism. But nature is today also the arena for an oddly sublimated politics, and recent nature writing reflects some peculiarly modern concerns – sometimes in a way that the nice liberal audience would surely disown if applied to human affairs. In an era of immigration anxiety, for example, the ubiquitous ecological rhetoric of “native” and “invasive” species projects on to the natural world the patterns of human geopolitics. People talk of the grey squirrel as though he were the Middle Eastern asylum-seeker or eastern European plumber of tabloid hate-mongering, come over here as a benefits tourist or cunning job-thief.

Consider, too, the poor sheep, target of George Monbiot’s passionate scorn in Feral, his recent manifesto for “rewilding” (bringing back animals that were once native, such as wolves). “I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep,” Monbiot writes. “I hate them.” Why so? “Partly as a result of their assaults,” Monbiot laments, evoking a picture of serried ranks of sheep marching militaristically over the hillsides in coordinated attacks, “Wales now possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe.” Sheep have been able to wreak such devastation, he says, “because they were never part of our native ecosystem”, and so “the vegetation of this country has evolved no defences against sheep.”

So goes the green version of the English Defence League: sheep aren’t natives! They are “a feral invasive species”. They don’t belong here. “Invasive species,” Monbiot complains, “challenge attempts to defend a unique and distinctive fauna and flora” – just as anti-immigration demagogues claim that foreigners will destroy a unique and distinctive British culture. “Certain animals and plants,” Monbiot warns us, even “have characteristics that allow them to invade” – what, like Panzers and U-boats? – “and colonise many parts of the world.” Thus each ecosystem is conceived as a little Westphalian nation state, vulnerable to assault by expansionist outsiders.